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RPC 2006-2007 Home | RPC Current Year Home
RPC Meeting Minutes
September 20, 2006
Present: Balik, Collins, Flath, Heyman, Hornbach, Hoye, Lindeman, Nedelsky, Wheaton and Contant (ACE Fellow)
- Meeting was called to order at 3:10 pm
- Minutes from the meeting of September 13, 2006 were approved (with a correction of the spelling of Hornback to Hornbach).
- Representative was selected for Trustee committee on Advancement (Flath) and tentatively for Social Responsibility Committee (Latham)
- Heyman announced that Lorne Robinson would be joining us on Oct 4 to discuss the preliminary analysis of the impact of the need aware admissions process.
- Dan Balik provided a summary of the COACHE survey results with a brief discussion. He will be providing a more detailed presentation Thursday, Sept 22, at Windows on our Work. His presentation will be made available to the committee.
- Began discussion of the strategies for enhancing faculty support. Chair Heyman reviewed the goals of this activity as attracting and retaining faculty, improving teaching, and improving student/faculty scholarship.
The committee discussed these goals at some length. Questions were raised about whether there were problems related to some of these goals. For example, it was suggested that faculty salaries and spousal hiring issues may have more to do with attracting faculty to Macalester than teaching load or frequency of sabbaticals. In addition, measuring the benefits of any action would be difficult (‘how to measure improved teaching?’). Ideas were suggested to gather internal information from department chairs on recent faculty searches to determine whether departments actually hired their first choices and if not, why not? A historical analysis was also suggested to determine whether faculty retention changed after granting early sabbatical leaves to untenured faculty.
Hornbach presented his spreadsheet on computing the implications (costs) of a variety of course teaching reduction policies (see Moodle site for spreadsheet). This spreadsheet would allow a variety of options to be analyzed in terms of impact on faculty FTE, number of students, student:faculty ratio, average class size, etc.
Data on current course teaching reductions were presented and discussed. Expected course releases for the year total 189 including first year, junior faculty sabbaticals, regular sabbaticals, grants, department chair, committee chair, administrative, parental leave, and others.
It was decided that the conversation will continue next meeting on the benefits of improved faculty support options and the costs of each option.
- FPAC meeting to discuss use of Wallace Travel money. Decided not to revise criteria for those monies and encourage current request to secure resources from other options.
- Meeting adjourned at 3:35 pm.
Respectfully submitted by Cheryl Contant
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